How Amazon convinced millions of people to welcome “listening devices” into their homes

How Amazon convinced millions of people to welcome “listening devices” into their homes
Image by kirstyfields from Pixabay

“They’re trying to move as intimately as possible and as quietly as possible into everyday life. Amazon wants to have the entire environment, essentially miked… All these intimacies, all this insight is being integrated, analyzed and integrated. That is an extraordinary kind of power that has never before existed.” Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

The PBS Frontline documentary “Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos” also includes an interview with Meredith Whittaker, co-director of the A.I. Now Institute at NYU, who made this point:

“Alexa is one more way for Amazon to gather extremely valuable data. And this data collection is extremely important to this business model. It’s extremely hard to do … convincing people to just deploy something like this in their home is— it’s a brilliant trick.”

How do you feel about Alexa being in your home?

PBS, 2/17/20

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